But maybe that is part of the “problem.” Elit is well-known and practiced every place we look, but we can lay little claim to it. It is well beyond its adolescence, and within a few years (if not already), except for its stand-out practitioners, it will be so common as to not be worthy of any special note.

That is our tipping point, and the moment is now. We can lay claim to electronic literature, but we need to do it (as some of us have pointed out) in an all-inclusive and democratic way. It must be presented in our classrooms in all its forms, not just random-generated poetry or game narrative, but in every way we see it appearing online or off. Our students must know that elit is not all poetry but fiction, too, and drama, and every genre in between. They must know it is not just in the classroom, it is in front of them every day on the web, although they may not recognize it. We can show them where to look, and what to look for. We can tell them how the current elit community offers an aesthetic core around which the rest can adhere.

If we have any hope of encouraging our students to read electronic literature outside the classroom, or our young creative writers to try their hand at this kind of “writing,” they must see it has a broader audience, with both an aesthetic future and (for the writers) at least some potential for financial gain, either outright or through jobs in related industries. They can not see it primarily as an art practiced, and favored, by those of us in academia: for a new form struggling to gain its larger identity, readership, and practitioners, the academic world, while a necessary part of the overall strategy, is too small.

For the original source of this post, and the previous (and ongoing) conversation, visit http://www.newmediawritingforum.co.uk/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=156

• N-gram generations (word-based and character-based) * Diastic readings * Cut-ups * n+7s * template generations * codework transformations
• metaphysical speculation, startling juxtapositions, profane ranting, unpopular political perspectives, and moments of great (though possibly incomprehensible) beauty
• our favorite poems from the past several years of the group blog Gnoetry Daily
• creative Foreword by C.T. Funkhouser (of “Prehistoric Digital Poetry” fame)

All for the low low price of FREE. Get the pdf file, and follow our continuing adventures on Gnoetry Daily and our Chapbooks page!

Since I don’t want to post an ad without any additional content, I’ll now consider the question: how should we refer to the act of generating text poetry using computer tools and algorithms?

This becomes a question because there are at least four traditions of computer poetry generation:

• The Poetic tradition – people like Jackson Mac Low and Charles Hartman, who are primarily interested in writing good poetry. They may use the term aleatory and draw from the Surrealist, Language, Flarf, and Conceptual traditions.
• The Oulipo tradition – influenced by the French academics/practitioners who are interested in novel constraints and methods of automation. They may use the term combinatory and potential, and frame the use of corpora as a constraint (i.e. only using a certain set of words.)
• The Programming tradition – recreational “hackers” and professional programmers whose goal is developing interesting programs, e.g. the developers of Travesty, Dissociated Press, Racter, and JanusNode, as well as computing pioneers such as Lutz and Stratchey. They may use the term stochastic, and focus on the types of algorithms and interface affordances involved.
• The Research tradition – both scientific and literary theoretic academics who are exploring issues in language and cognition. Scientific approaches may use terms such as poetry generation (following the more general “natural language generation”) and may think of poetry generators as a long-term project towards modeling the creative process by determining which parts can be automated. Literary theoretic approaches may use terms such as appropriation and uncreative.

People can be in more than one category to different degrees, and all of these have valuable contributions to make. But because these different traditions emphasize different histories and different aspects of the activity, they are likely to continue to require different names for the activity.

But maybe the best approach is ludic; roll 6-sided dice 4 times and consult the following expression:

(((1d3)(post-,avant-,'pata-))
 ((1d6)(computational,digital,procedural,appropriative,stochastic,aleatoric))
 ((1d3)(poetic,lyric,verse))
 ((1d3)(generation,production,authoring)))

so rolls of (4, 3, 1, 2) would get you “avant-procedural poetic generation”, for example!

Look at the table of contents and you’ll see that McLuhan’s piece, “Culture and Technology,” is nestled among contributions by pioneers of Dada such as Rauol Hausmann to pioneers of computer generated poetry Max Bense and Margaret Masterman; it’s also included along with essays and poems by “typescape” poets Franz Mon and Dom Sylvester Houedard, work by cut-up master William Burroughs, and even the more bookbound Robert Creeley.

In this single collection, we not only get a sense of McLuhan as engaged with poetics but we see the poets as writing thoroughly activist media poems. They are even activist in the sense that McLuhan was imagining when he wrote in his Astronauts of Inner-Space contribution that “…if politics is the art of the possible, its scope must now, in the electric age, include the shaping and programming of the entire sensory environment as a luminous work of art.” Politics as art and poetry; art and poetry as politics.

*

It is remarkable that in just ten years, since the publication of the first book on electronic literature (Loss Glazier’s Digital Poetics in 2001), e-literature has firmly established itself as a thriving field. However, all too often, readings of e-literature (or digital-born writing that makes the most of the capabilities of its medium) take the form of accounts of what appears on the screen, with little attention to the material context of the writing – whether its hardware or software. Or, conversely, such readings point to how e-literature reminds us of Marshall McLuhan’s dictum that the medium is the message. Instead, this panel takes up Katherine Hayles’ injunction for “media-specific analysis” of e-literature by focusing on the defining role of the interface in particular. Our argument is this: personal computers from the 1980s as much as the latest multitouch devices are finally revealing themselves not just as media but as media whose functioning depends on interfaces that frame what can and cannot be written. Further, e-literature often deliberately works against or draws attention to the strictures of digital writing interfaces and so it is an ideal site to explore this tight inter-connection between writing and writing interface. All four presentations, then, try to shift the definition of “interface” outside its conventional usage (in which interface is usually defined quite broadly as the intermediary layer between a user and a digital computer or computer program) and apply it to digital writing/media from the last twenty years to mean the layer between the reader and particular computer platforms which allows the reader to interact with a literary text.

As an example of this approach, Dene Grigar’s paper opens our panel with a detailed discussion of the exhibit “Early Authors of Electronic Literature: The Eastgate School, Voyager Artists, and Independent Productions” (now installed at the University of Washington). Grigar looks specifically at the major technological shifts in affordances and constraints provided by early computer interfaces and the ways in which e-literature writers from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s worked with and against these interfaces. For example, she discusses the command-line interface of the Apple IIe – which was released in 1983 – as an example of an interface that exemplifies an ideology wholly different from the now dominant Graphic User Interface. Thus, the command-line interface also makes possible entirely different texts and entirely different modes of thinking/creating such as that exemplified by bpNichol’s “First Screening” from 1984. Stephanie Strickland and Marjorie Luesebrink then offer a co-presentation in which they move the discussion into the 21st century by focusing on works included in the recently published Electronic Literature Collection Volume Two – an online anthology that highlights and preserves exemplary e-literature from 2001 – 2010. This collection features a stunning variety of interface choices in works of animation, generation, augmented reality, gaming, hypertext, AI-based interactive drama, interactive fiction, poetry and video.

Strickland and Luesebrink focus in particular on e-literature whose interface requires the reader’s bodily movement as a fundamental component as well as those texts whose reading calls for a knowledge of code as well as a familiarity with network forms such as the database, personal home page, Frequently Asked Questions list, blog, listserv, commercial website, wiki, or email. Thus, while they acknowledge the interface defines what is or can be written, Strickland and Luesebrink demonstrate that the interface also creates the reader.

I, Lori Emerson, will then take a slightly different approach in thatI argue recent e-literature by Judd Morrissey and Jason Nelson represents a broad movement in e-literature to draw attention to the move toward the so-called “interface free” – or, the interface that seeks to disappear altogether by becoming as “natural” as possible. It is against this troubling attempt to mask the workings of the interface and how it delimits creative production that Judd Morrissey creates “The Jew’s Daughter” – a work in which readers are invited to click on hyperlinks in the narrative text, links which do not lead anywhere so much as they unpredictably change some portion of the text. Likewise working against the clean and transparent interface of the Web, in “game, game, game and again game,” Jason Nelson’s hybrid poem-videogame self-consciously embraces a hand-drawn, hand-written interface while deliberately undoing videogame conventions through nonsensical mechanisms that ensure players never advance past level 121/2. As such, both Morrissey and Nelson intentionally incorporate interfaces that thwart readers’ access to the text so that they are forced to see how such interfaces are not natural so much as they define what and how we read and write.

Finally, Mark Sample provides a close-reading of one work in particular that in fact takes advantage of the “interface free” multitouch display: released just in the last year, “Strange Rain” is an experiment in digital storytelling for Apple iOS devices (the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad) designed by new media artist Erik Loyer. As dark storm clouds shroud the screen of the iOS device, the player can take advantage of the way in which the multi-touch interface is supposedly “interface-free” – the player can touch and tap its surface, causing what Loyer describes as “twisting columns of rain” to splash down upon the player’s first-person perspective. In the app’s “whispers” and “story” modes “Strange Rain” unites two longstanding tropes of e-literature: the car crash – the most famous occurring in Michael Joyce’s Afternoon (1990); and falling letters – words that descend on the screen or even in large-scale installation pieces such as Camille Utterback and Romy Achituv’s Text Rain (1999). Sample argues “Strange Rain” transcends the familiar tropes of car crashes and falling text, reconfiguring the interface as a means to transform confusion into certainty, and paradoxically, intimacy into alienation.

“Some blame generations of teachers for being afraid of verse, while others decry the trivialisation of poetry via such things as online poetry generators. All of these suggestions have some validity, probably operating in combination, and it has to be said that we are the poorer for it.”

So my request is: can someone point me to an article that more fully argues this point about online poetry generators trivializing poetry? I’m sure there must be articles about this out there, but for some reason a google search for “poetry generators trivialize poetry” isn’t helping me. My main purpose isn’t to ridicule this argument, but to understand it better and hopefully to ensure that it’s not true in my own work.

Second, an announcement. We’ve been furiously trivializing poetry on Gnoetry Daily recently, using our culture-impoverishing poetry generators to explore topics such as the September 11 attacks, the Christian Bible, software for phonemically analyzing text for poetry generation, infinite Socratic dialogues, and the ontological and epistemological value of programming. We use a combination of word- and character-based n-gram generators, template generators, diastic readings, n+7s, cut-ups, codework transformations, and more, with a variety of levels of interactivity and editing. We’ve been joined by some new poets and generators recently, and we’d love to hear what you think about our work.

I didn’t mean to bleg and spam and run, so I’ll finish with the only thing I know that can make up for it… MATH! Yeah, you heard me, math! I’ve been working on using set theory and algorithm notation as a basis for developing a taxonomy of computer poetry generators, and I’m starting with Theo Lutz’s classic 1959 “Stochastische Texte” algorithm as a case study for analysis. After the cut is the latest version of what I have so far. If you don’t like it… either tell me who’s been talking trash about poetry generators, or check out what’s been going on at Gnoetry Daily!

The approach I’m going to take is to define an algorithm for computer poetry generation that is general enough to cover both rule-based generation as well as markov chained n-gram generation, including things like diastics, erasures, and Oulipo n+7s and “combinatorial” generators. Then, each individual approach will be described in terms of the general algorithm, and this will serve as a basis for exploring the differences (and therefore taxonomic categories) of the individual approaches.

Let Words be a set of words, characters, strings, or more complex linguistic entities. The term “words” is used in the mathematical sense of sequences defined on an alphabet. The elements of Words will typically be linguistic words and punctuation, but in some generators they will be characters, sets of text, or parts of speech.

Let Poem be a sequence w₁, w₂, …, w_|p| where w_x ∈ Words. Poem may be composed of subsequences of Stanzas and/or Lines; alternately stanzas and lines may be indicated by punctuation such as end-of-line characters. Linguistic words in a Poem may be separated by spaces which are part of the set Words, or it may be assumed that spaces will be inserted as needed for human processing.

Let initialize be a method for determining the initial elements of Poem.

Let editable be a method for determining which elements of Poem may be replaced during revisions.

Let Replacements be a subset of Words. These are the linguistic entities that will be used during revisions.

Let replace be a method for editing a Poem during revision.

The methods used by initialize, editable, and replace will vary: they could be table listings, random selections from a set, algorithms, or decisions made by a human calling on their expertise and experience.

Then we can define a Basic Generation Algorithm.

1.   initialize(Poem)

2.   for each revision
3.      for each word in Poem
4.         if editable(word)
5.            replace(word)

In line 1 the initial version of the poem is created. At this point the poem might still be made up of template words that will not be used for a final poem.
Line 2 iterates over a poem for a number of revisions. Line 3 iterates through the parts of the poem. As a sequence, Poem is ordered, but that ordering is not necessarily followed when revising: for example, the middle of a poem might be revised before the beginning.
In Lines 4 and 5, an editable part of Poem is identified and revised.

We will use Lutz’s algorithm as a case study. Theo Lutz was a German scholar who wrote an article in 1959 talking about a generator that produced lines using templates and words from Kafka’s “The Castle”. Sample output given in the article is:

NOT EVERY LOOK IS NEAR. NO VILLAGE IS LATE.
A CASTLE IS FREE AND EVERY FARMER IS FAR.
EVERY STRANGER IS FAR. A DAY IS LATE.
EVERY HOUSE IS DARK. AN EYE IS DEEP

So Lutz’s algorithm can be expressed in terms of the General Algorithm in the following way.

Logical Operators = {A, AN, EVERY, NO, NOT EVERY}

Subjects = {COUNT, STRANGER, LOOK, CHURCH, CASTLE, PICTURE, EYE, VILLAGE, TOWER, FARMER, WAY, GUEST, DAY, HOUSE, TABLE, LABOURER}

Predicates = {OPEN, SILENT, STRONG, GOOD, NARROW, NEAR, NEW, QUIET, FAR, DEEP, LATE, DARK, FREE, LARGE, OLD, ANGRY}

Logical Constants = {AND, OR, THEREFORE, .}

Let Template Elements be a set of strings { logical_operator_slot, subject_slot, IS, predicate_slot, logical_constant_slot, . }

Let Words = Logical Operators ∪ Subjects ∪ Predicates ∪ Logical Constants ∪ Template Elements

Let the sequence Poem be a function from {1, 2, …, 10} to Words

So a poem is going to be made up of ten parts, where each part will be one of the Words.

Let initialize be the function from Poem to the set Template Elements that defines the following sequence: (logical_operator_slot, subject_slot, IS, predicate_slot, logical_constant_slot, logical_operator_slot, subject_slot, IS, predicate_slot, .)

Let editable be an indicator function on Poem where

Ieditable(x) =	{	0 if x ∈ {IS, .}
		1 for all other x

Let replace be the following algorithm:

Given stochastic select: a method of randomly choosing an element of a set.

Given the set Words and a w ∈ Poem, replace w with:

case w of
  logical_operator_slot:   stochastic select from Logical Operators
  subject_slot:            stochastic select from Subjects
  predicate_slot:          stochastic select from Predicates
  logical_constant_slot:   stochastic select from Logical Constants

So a poem is going to be initialized into a sequence of slot symbols representing a template. Every slot except for the word “IS” and for the period will be editable. During generation, the slots will be replaced by an appropriate subset of Words: the first slot symbol will be replaced by a Logical Operator, the second by a Subject, etc.

Now we may trace through the General Algorithm.

initialize(Poem)

The initialize function defines Poem as: (logical_operator_slot, subject_slot, IS, predicate_slot, logical_constant_slot, logical_operator_slot, subject_slot, IS, predicate_slot, .).

for each revision
   for each text in Poem

There will only be one revision: replacing the template “slots” with the appropriate texts. The algorithm does this by iterating through the text elements of the poem.

      if editable(text)
         replace(text)

The editable indicator function replaces every slot, and leaves unchanged the two IS elements and the period. The replace algorithm changes each slot in the sequence into a word, which it selects from the approriate subset of Words.

For example, when the algorithm begins to generate a poem:

• The editable will determine that logical_operator_slot is editable, after which replace will determine that it should be replaced by an element of Logical Operators, and stochastically select an element of that set, such as “EVERY”.
• In the next iteration through the Poem sequence, editable will determine that subject_slot is editable, and replace will determine that subject_slot should be replaced by an element of Subjects, such as “VILLAGE”.
• In the next iteration, editable will determine that “IS” is not editable, and leave it unchanged.
• In the next iteration, editable will determine that predicate_slot is editable, and replace will determine that subject_slot should be replaced by an element of Predicates, such as “DARK”.

and so on.

This is modeled above by considering a Poem as a single line, where Poems can be continually generated; however Poem could also be modeled as an infinite set.

The Unprintable

(August 8-16, 2011)

Alan Sondheim

“A lur is a long natural blowing horn [...] The word lur is still very much alive in the Swedish language, indicating any funnel-shaped implement used for producing or receiving sound. [...]” Wikipedia.

So blowing might be a kind of scattering or a calling, might be a kind of signal. And I think of Lurid Numbers as a kind of calling, calling-forth both readerly and writerly textuality, but also an interpenetrating and entangled intermediary, the catatonic machine which might or might not open itself to the distending of symbols, graphemes. The machine reads itself; it doesn’t like to be bothered. It doesn’t like to read Lurid Numbers, because what is lurid, sleazy, is a bone in the works, can’t be read. And apparently the publishing machine of Blaze-Vox, Blaze-Lur, couldn’t read, broke down over, returned to catatonia (for what bureaucracy likes to be bothered), over what should have been a simple reproduction from code to paper – which did not, could not, occur? What do you say to this, to the insertion, beyond the readerly and writerly text, of the text which breaks the machine, which refuses purity?

Sandy Baldwin

Yes, I agree. You provoke me to think and respond. I see the lur as producing a signal, one that problematizes signaling behaviors. I see this in the phrase “very much alive in the Swedish language”: the word as “alive” is the problematization of signaling behaviors, where such behaviors as part of our modern understanding of communications that necessarily contain / are contained by systematization and closure. For modernity, to signal is to invoke an institutional culture that handles the call. (The lur problematizes any final response to your provocation as well, and instead leads me to a more “funnel-shaped” answer.) The blowing lur, the funnel-shaped implement (I read it as impediment, which already is the bone in the throat, the marrow in the grapheme), is a problematic signal. Lur also makes me hear a broken lure. Lure is a decoy, but also allurement and enticement. The lure is camouflaged and does not yet reveal the spoilage of the lurid. The breakage from lure to lur is the object escaping, the rotting out of the object. The kernel of matter that presupposes a machine – there is a machine threshing every “grain” of the real; the machine that makes everything itself, that ensures all is systematic and well-formed (machined) – is lost, leaving only an echo. In all this, the orphic song, the stirring of animal spirits, the original poem, the return from the dead. It is here that the where the machinic is not machinic.

You lead me to think that Lurid Numbers can’t be read or printed because the writing did not occur – which would require the iterability of closed world of the machine – it is not authored. I admit to be radically uncertain of the “author-function” of this text with my name on it. I recall that I did not intend for it to be unprintable or unreadable, at least not in any straightforward sense, though I do think I intended it to be undigestable. It remains in a lurid- or sleaze-world, so thin, flimsy, barely lit.

I wonder, in terms of the end of your provocation, is such a text still a text? I think of text as requiring reading and writing as advanced, modern processes; machinic processes, I suppose. I do not know if I can claim this for myself – not to have written a text – but I do wonder how far “text” can bear a lack of purity. I think more in terms such as “wryting” (which you coined), which suggests to me a kind of intensive, non-textual investment …

Alan

Wryting is of and in the midst of the body; Lurid Numbers skitters across the body, but drags, scrapes the escarpment of the body as well. “Text” is like “nice” – it can bear anything, it is not that smooth, but the family of usages containing it are smoothed out – in the case of Lurid Numbers, perhaps dilapidated as well. I’d think of you as an author for the simple reason – the text wouldn’t otherwise exist.

This might be the result of a crisis. To paraphrase L. Apostel, “The Justification of Set Theories” (in Logic, Methodology, and the Philosophy of Science, 1965), substituting texts for classes (the original is based on the comprehension axiom), “At the beginning of a textual procedure, when nothing whatever is known about sources or filters, complete freedom is given as to the construction of texts (1). When the textual procedure is already established, and when the results of earlier operations are stable, the construction proceeds without rearrangement: texts now are embedded in a formal and canonic history, which is taken for granted and is machine-decomposable; the roots are there, in a very classical sense (2). However, when a crisis is reached and the procedures hitherto followed must be altered, textuality returns to the original sources, accompanied by new procedures and filters (3). When the procedures operate without crisis, but when it is imperative that procedures at one level should be strongly distinguished from and yet completely determined by the procedures applied on the earlier level, we have (4).” Let’s think of (4) as conservation, and the third as permanent crisis, under the signs of capital and the fast-forward simulacra of signs. Then we’re in the skitters and jitters, aren’t we? Sufficient crisis, and the market breaks down, the machine breaks down, your self-identification as author breaks down. And that’s when things get interesting, when the machine reaches a state of indigestion.

What causes the crisis? On one hand the formal condition that upper and lower ASCII don’t exhaust the pixel-by-pixel gridwork of inscriptions; there’s always the glitsch, the fury beyond acceptable bandwidth. Most of our lives – in fact the phenomenology of our being-in-the-world – is conditioned by filtering-out, not only so the clean and proper body of the signifier may make itself felt against our skin, but also because anything else creates an ontological shift where the matrix of communication, community, disappears altogether. The crisis is of course the implosion. It’s that. It’s those. It’s when “a” replaces “the” down to the rootlessness. Lurid Numbers unroots numbers, signs, and symbols, replacing “a” itself with an unknowable little-object-a beyond the spectrum, smothering the spectrum. It rests, remains, sleeps there. So you do a pdf!

Sandy

Yes, I agree. It would be possible – maybe? I think? – to map the text as crossing thresholds or crisis points. Can we think of all texts in relation to their procedure and whether or not there is a crisis, an alteration? The quote from Apostel also situates crisis in a relation to origins, or pathology of the text, keeping in mind that these are inscriptive origins and symptoms, origins in the topography of transcriptions.

I was speaking to the poet and critic Chris Funkhouser about the problem of printing Lurid Numbers. He brought up the possibility of an unpublishable book. He saw this as the future of increasing information interlinking, where all possible sentences are linked into the net already; all possible texts already generated in some way; no “new” text possible without being plagiarism from the first. This is, of course, a version of Borges’ “Library of Babel,” and also the nightmare aspect of Ted Nelson’s Xanadu, where the density of hypertextual transclusion shuts down any new utterance. In practice, it is already being implemented with plagiarism detection systems such as Turnitin (my university purchased this software and wants it to be used on student papers). I found myself agreeing with Chris that this is a potential both for contemporary forms of writing, flarf being the example he used, and for the inseparability of the practice of writing from the apparatus of word processing software, in the largest sense. However, Lurid Numbers is unprintable rather than unpublishable. We could say that these are two forms of crisis. Unpublishability is a problem with the institution of authorship, and the confusion between economies of creativity and capital. Unprintability is a problem with the technical production of scriptive materialities, and a confusion between the conceptual potential of digital simulations and the institution that anchors these to a machinery of materialization, or more precisely, to a machine of printing out and handling. The confusion is already there in the simulation: MS Word and other software continue to simulate a page, while at the same time offering something else entirely. Lurid Numbers does have its own unpublishable pretexts, and unpublishability does relate to a materialization of the text – it is reasonable to see the legal institution of authorship in this way – but, whereas publishing involves a materiality of expression – creative expression capitalized through the author’s name – we could see the unprintability as a materiality of phenomena and the body. Is this the crisis and implosion (or explosion)? Of the book as object, as in my hand and before me, as technical product … The crisis of unprintability is worth studying on its own, and in relation to other crisis taking place in institutions of the book.

Finally, thinking of what you say of the cause of the crisis: you set the glit(s)ch as the “fury beyond acceptable bandwidth.” Perhaps “fury” is the correlate of crisis? A passion, a vehemence, beyond any law – and therefore in relation to the laws and institution of print and authorship – a fury that seeks the work, and – why not – seeks justice for the writer. Why justice? If unpublishability and unprintability involve the writer as name and capital (the writer’s head), then the fury of writing unpublishes and unwrites, leaving nothing but the body and the roiling of its interior. The work, the writing, the scriptive orgins – all these come from and go to this fury.

Alan

Just a couple of points here. No matter how much interlinking occurs, statistically, fantasy notwithstanding, all possible sentences etc. really constitute such an inaccessibly high number, that all the processing power of the universe would never complete the task, even given the 13+ billion years we’ve been around, even given incredibly high-speed processing. As you know, n-furcations quickly spin out of control. The second point relates to pain, and the inexpressibility of severe pain, and I want to end my contribution here, in relation to what might be foregone, the McGill Pain Questionnaire notwithstanding. So a few brief words left behind in lieu of an other text.

Inexpressibility occurs because of the difficulty of expressing interior states that might not have a clearcut symptomology (as thirst does, for example) – and also because severe pain derails speech and language and thought, as the internalized horizon of the flesh is muted or screams in abeyance. All of this touches on the pain of the signifier and its inexpressible relation to death – and all of this touches, as well, on the unprintable. The unprintable then is returned, as if by media mail, to the body that produced it. And from this moment, your text, as pdf, opens up and opens, as pain disperses, is dispersed, as the symbolic ultimately collapses, as is its wont…

What good is a writer if he can’t destroy literature? And us… what good are we if we don’t help as much as we can in that destruction? – Julio Cortazar

Geoffrey Gatza, fearless director of BlazeVox, that “publisher of weird little books,” took the final proofs of Lurid Numbers to his printer on July 27, 2011. Lurid Numbers is a collection of more or less “codeworked” text – much like i did the weird motor drive, my 2007 book with BlazeVox – written through simple computer scripts and word processings, and through my own impulse, inquiry, and idiocy. The next day he came back with some odd news in the form of an email from the publisher:

—— Forwarded Message
From: <no_reply@createspace.com>
Date: Tue, 26 Jul 2011 12:02:16 -0700 (PDT)
To: Geoffrey Gatza <editor@blazevox.org>
Subject: Files for Lurid Numbers, 978-1609640705 require your
attention

The interior and cover files for Lurid Numbers, 978-1609640705 have been reviewed.The cover file meets our submission requirements; it is not necessary for you to make any revisions to this file or upload it again.The interior file does not meet our submission requirements for the reason(s) listed below. Please make any necessary adjustments to your interior file and upload it again by logging in to createspace.com.The interior file contains pages with unreadable text or “jibberish” which we are unable to move forward with as it may appear as a file error in manufacturing. Please submit a revised interior file for further review.

Best regards,
The CreateSpace Team

As we like to say in academia, the email was “interesting,” that is, it could be read as linked to a number of other cultural domains and protocols. The relation of the “interior” to the “cover” repeats and takes part in the history of the “book,” where the cover is the limit of the work of writing; the cover is the enclosure or partition, the  event and inscription of multiple institutions: of authorship (if the work is under a pseudonym or in some way unsigned, the copyright page still must contain an author’s name, even if it is “anonymous”), commerce (the name of the publisher, legal descriptions of rights and regulations, and so on), and archiving (library of congress number, date of publication, etc.). Along with this, the fact that the interior of the book was somehow rotten or broken seemed both a judgment and a simple fact of this book. It was even better that this was expressed iconographically in the cover, which did meet “submission requirements.” I saw the cover as a submission of the contents to a single image. The cover shows a butchered and already old, slightly rotted fish. The image is photoshopped, neon and definitely lurid. Geoffrey directed me to this image, and I loved the combination of the repulsive and slimy, the mundane and organic, with the software transformation that keeps it real but artificial as well. It did indeed seem to submit and capture the interior. And then: “the interior file contains pages with unreadable text” seems to me an almost ontological statement, one that rubs against the proximity between the written work and the human. We may submit, we may submit a cover – ourselves – that meets requirements (of culture, of others), but our interiors are often quite different, unreadable. I also appreciated the misspelling of gibberish, suggesting a virality of the unreadable text into the printer’s email. Finally: “we are unable to move forward [...] as it may appear as a file error in manufacturing” suggested to me an event or force of the work beyond the interior file, a hidden explosion breaking the apparatus that machined it, and seeping or flooding past the cover.

In short, I was pleased to become more than just another job for the printer, to become a new process and something beyond the routine. At the same time, I was concerned, wondering what would happen with my interior file, as it were. I found out five days later, on August 1, 2011, when Geoffrey informed me in an email that

they cannot print this book and there is nothing I can do about it. [...] this is something completely new and I have to say I am perplexed by the mechanizations of modern times. The printers are not opposed to you or your work, this is a situation of a printing process that is highly automated and this registers exactly like a printers error to their machine. It is not a human that we must cajole into agreeing that this is art, which was my first take on this, as with the printer who cannot spell. This is a matter of a quality control camera that will reject books that look like this. I talked with a lot of people in the company and even had my lawyer call them to see if great weight would move the immovable. But no, their system will literally stop when it would try to produce your work.

A writing that stops the computer system, the very system designed to print out writing: what more could I ask for? What more frustrating thing, as well, so close to the print out of the book, that fetish object that makes authors out of writers? I was judged by the computer to have written something, i.e. it did not deny that there was an input that it could judge, but it evaluated my writing as unprintable, as a writing that can only remain in the space of the computer, within the possibilities of software. My interior file was bummed out but also filled or luridly lit up with a deep pleasure.

The act of writing is related to the absence of the work, but is invested in the Work as book. The madness of writing – this insane game – is the relation of writing; a relation established not between the writing and production of the book but through the books production, between the act of writing and the absence of the work. [...] To write is to produce the absence of the work (worklessness, unworking, [désoeuvrement]). Or again: writing is the absence of the work as it produces itself through the work, traversing it throughout. Writing as unworking (in the active sense of the word) is the insane game, the indeterminacy that lies between reason and unreason. – Maurice Blanchot

BTW, the book is here: http://www.blazevox.org/index.php/Shop/Poetry/lurid-numbers-by-sandy-baldwin-244/

EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION

Rui Torres (FCHS/UFP) and Manuel Portela (FL/UC)

The use of computers in the humanities raises creative, as well as institutional and intellectual questions. One important set of questions concerns new methods for editing and organizing different kinds of texts (graphic, audio, video, etc.). The impact of hypertext and hypermedia on the scholarly archive, which is increasingly published in electronic formats, has fostered a conceptual shift from the archive as a classified hierarchical collection of texts to the archive as a decentred and reconfigurable network of texts.

At the same time, the convergent multimodality of digital textuality opens up a new editing and archival space for multimedia and intermedia forms of writing. In the current technological context, innovative and experimental literary forms become relevant, as many of the operations that the machine provides can be found in previous literary practices: from collages and automatic writing to narrative permutations and intermedia poetry. This issue of the journal is specifically concerned with the problems of representing, archiving and publishing experimental literary forms in digital spaces.

RANGE OF TOPICS

The academic journal Cibertextualidades welcomes research papers about processes and methods of representation, preservation and dissemination of intermedia and multimedia literary practices using digital archival systems.

This Call for Papers is open to original contributions in the following three topics:

1. Visuality and intermediality in experimental literature: The expressive use of materials and spaces is a defining feature of visual forms of poetry and fiction. Visual and intermedia experimentation has also originated new literary forms in electronic media, and multimodality is one important material aspect of current online environments. Digital media created the conditions for a new encounter between the tradition of intermedia works and new multimodal, networked, and programmed spaces. Works based on techniques such as calligraphy, photocopy, collage, graffiti, holography, etc.; practices such as installation, happening, and performance; and works based on sound, image, and video recording media, allow us to explore the potential of digital archives for representing and simulating large corpora of non-digital intermedia works. Sub-topics may include:
   1. Remediation and interartistic migrations;
   2. The materiality of signifying forms;
   3. Technological mediation in contemporary poetry;
   4. Analysis of hybrid forms dependent on verbivocovisual practices;
   5. Digital re-coding of the visual and performative materiality of experimental practices.
2. Combination and generativity in cyberliterature: Cyberliterature designates those literary texts whose construction is based on computing procedures: combinatory, multimedia, or interactive. This topic includes studies about programming languages and software involved in the creation of literary works, as well as archival and preservation issues. Subtopics may include:
   1. Digital re-coding of the visual and performative materiality of experimental practices;
   2. Problems of preservation and dissemination of digital texts, particularly of its early forms;
   3. Translation and interoperability of programming languages used in specific works;
   4. Studies in the emulation of software used in specific works.
3. Digital archives and electronic publishing models: New possibilities for archiving, displaying and disseminating multimedia works, including such subtopics as:
   1. Taxonomies for organizing, understanding, and classifying the conceptual and material relations in born-digital literature and in electronic versions of pre-digital intermedia works;
   2. Methodologies for establishing and maintaining hypermedia digital archives, particularly in terms of the contributions of Humanities, Computer Science, and Library Information Science;
   3. Conceptual reflections about the design and implementation of digital archives, including data modeling, database structure, interface design, navigation systems, and editorial and electronic publication models.

For further information and Publication Norms, download the Call For Papers

Now, over the last year or so I’ve been asking myself: ytf am I doing this? When I code a poetry generator, what exactly am I exploring? How can I formalize, track, measure what I’m working on? There are no pre-existing representations. But I figured I’d use Jim Andrew’s comment as a starting point for thinking about charNG, the most recent generator I’ve developed.

charNG is a character n-gram generator in the tradition of Dissociated Press and Travesty. I coded it in my spare time over the past couple of months, posting various output on Gnoetry Daily, including for a chapbook of poems remixing the text of HP Lovecraft. (advert: if you enjoy surreal gothic arcana, you should take a look: Lovecraft Remixed.)

Anyway, after the cut I’ll trace the development of charNG, focusing on which aspects of the character n-gram generation I implemented, which I parameterized, which I made accessible in the graphic user interface, and why. See below for more.

Intro

The reason I need to think this through is because I do poetry generation the same way a cat stalks the room. I basically do whatever I’m interested in at the moment without much long-term planning. In part this is because my funded research is by nature fairly structured. So I figure if I keep my poetry generation as unstructured as possible, I’ll open myself to research and technologies I might not otherwise have a chance to work with. And since I’m doing poetry generation for myself, I might as well enjoy it.

Poetry generation is process; generators and outputs trace explorations.

Before I started charNG, I knew what character n-grams are, and I had a fairly good idea about how Dissociated Press and Travesty are related, but I wanted to do some coding on it to get a really good feel for the algorithms. I want to emphasize that what’s important here are the algorithms involved, not the code itself. Before too long the platform will be obsolete and the code will be usable only through emulators or antiques. But the algorithms will be the same as they were for Andrey Markov in 1906, as they were for Ausonius in the 4th Century AD, as they were for everybody before and in-between.

Output is subjective and software becomes obsolete, but output sets are infinite and methods and algorithms are eternal.

So: one reason to develop poetry generators it to acquire an intimate understanding of computional poetry algorithms. Once you have this understanding, you will have a stronger mastery of your tools.

Early Versions

First, what is a character n-gram? If you wanna know the details in as unmathematical way as possible, see the explanation I wrote up for charNG. A summary is: it’s a sequence of characters in a text.

I started with a simple interface, built in JavaScript. I chose client-side JavaScript because I wanted something that could be easily saved by anyone who found it interesting. Part of the reason I developed charNG was because there used to be a server-side Travesty generator on a url including eskimo/rstarr/poormfa, but that generator disappeared a couple months ago. But a client-side generator can be saved by anyone, and either re-used personally or posted publically if it’s got a free-software license (as charNG does).

The top textarea contains the corpus, from which the n-gram model is built. I’ve used Shakespeare as a “hello world” ever since I read The American Council of Trustees and Alumni’s report on “The Vanishing Shakespeare“, which talks about how Tha Bard is no longer required in many courses.

The next (grayed-out) textarea is a log of the computations so I can see what’s happening. Even when I’m using a good IDE I like to include logs as well as use debuggers, so if something wacky happens in a run I can see why it happened.

The two buttons show charNG’s first two capabilities: first was “analyze” to show the n-gram model being built; next was “Write”. At first charNG only output character bigrams.

Finally, the lowermost textarea shows the output of the generation.

So the first thing that charNG did was take a corpus (the topmost textarea), count all the different sequences of characters in it, and print it out in the greyed-out area. For example, if the corpus begins with “From fairest creatures we desire increase,”, and we’re building a 4-gram language model, then our model will include “From”, “rom “, “om f”, “m fa”, ” fai”, “fair”, and so on. Some of these may seem kind of strange, but as it turns out the 4-gram “om f” occurs 7 times in Tha Sonnets, in places like “whom fortune”, and “random from”.

The next thing it did was to determine how to use these n-gram models to write poetry. Well, if you’ve come up with the string “cre” so far, and your 4-gram model tells you (among other things) that these are the 4-grams it’s seen beginning with “cre”:

crea 13,
cred 3,
cree 2,
crep 1,
cres 1,
cret 1,

then you may want to just randomly pick a number between 1 and 21; if it’s 13 or less you write “a” to make “crea”; if it’s 14-16 you write “d” to make “cred”; if it’s 17 or 18 you write “e” to make “cree”; if it’s 19 you write “p” to make “crep”; if it’s 20 you pick “s” to make “cres”; if it’s 21 you write “t” to make “cret”. This sort of thing was developed by the engineer Claude Shannon around the 1940s, based on ideas by mathematician Andrey Markov from the early 1900s.

In charNG’s as shown above, the only options are “Write” (to generate text) and “Analyze” (to show the n-gram models in the corpus.) The n-gram model being used (bigram) is hard-coded, along with everything else except the choice of corpus.

Now as a tool, charNG by this point is not very flexible: it only can output something like this:

kn ich flomalveeane thin,
Whe pay s ld tharde whenl,
Wheecheluselauset’dothallseinkn’sselothrkn eav

Which sounds kinda like getting your teeth pulled out. But, it has made me familiar with character n-gram generation. In particular, I was curious about the extent to which you had to represent an n-gram model in memory (i.e. have a data structure that contained a string like “crea” paired to a number like “13″) or whether you could just generate by looking at the data model. The way I did it by just looking at the data model was inspired by how Dissociated Press, one of the earliest character n-gram generators, does it: every time you want to generate a number, you pick the string you’re looking for (like “cre”), you look through the corpus to see how many times “cre” exists, you pick one of those, and you print out the next character you want. It’s equivalent to explicitly building a model for generation, because every instance of an n-gram built at model-building time also exists at Dissociated Press-style-generation time. You’re basically just doing a run-time tradeoff: either you can have an initial model that takes up memory and initializiation time to build, or you can generate a bit slower. Why would anyone want to explore this question? That’s the joy of unfunded efforts: as long as what you’re doing is more fun than TV, you WIN.

When you generate poetry as described above, you have no funders to report to, no program managers to satisfy, no auditors to review your code, and no audience to concern you. Your knowledge and abilities are constrained only by your will. This in itself is poetry.

Mid-development

Anyways, at first charNG only output character bigrams, and the code was not that clean: I had to re-write it to generalize beyond bigrams. After I’d convinced myself that generating from corpus was the same as generating from models (I could have just written out a mathematical proof but this was more fun!) I had to decide whether to continue working on this. I figured I would, and I generalized the n from which n-grams could be built as a parameter in code:

Note that I’ve de-emphasized the corpus window at the expense of the analysis and the generation output. From my time working with designers in a web shop I’ve come to appreciate that I know nothing about design, so in general I just focus completely on functionality: an unadorned interface focusing on the view I need of the algorithms I’m exploring.

Since I’m working on this in my spare time, I don’t want to waste too much time recalling context (i.e. remembering how everything works, what I was working on, and what I thought might be fun to work on next) so I usually end a programming session by noting somewhere what I thought would be interesting next. In this case, I did so by listing the parameters and I was frequently changing on the GUI but not yet making them GUI-editable. (in part because, for example, verbose detail printing was not completely implemented.)

At this point in the development, I was thinking of ways to add newlines and spaces to make the output look more like 20th century free verse. I got the idea from the generator JanusNode, which has an “eecummingsify” button that uses rules to add spaces given a configuration file of text to match for. I think that’s brilliant, but I wanted something simpler. At this point I was just adding newlines every once in a while and generating from higher-order n-grams. But I was already getting more interesting results:

But I worse cold differite,
And han steep in Grece crossed inher’d,
And to despacious cons my memoving,
And did moan walks;
And be.
And this,
And cleasure brange canot me, death of look,
And besmell’ to sic plague-tiend’ring paid dear;
They he can all a faults, of forbeauty, new-fould would ashinks bles up his shal, do you shalf wouldst you no me
When love’s not gones on sakes brain worth to bide,
That shall is thiefs his in our befor ther or time tendom leaven by mortunearseth showers gavength hell?

The above is a contiguous selection from unsupervised generation (i.e. generating a bunch of lines and selecting several adjacent lines without breaking them up or editing them) from Tha Sonnets. The repeated “And” in the selection gives it a bit of coherence, and it has some nice phrases. 4-grams are great for portmanteaux: you’re looking at just enough context to make interesting new words, without getting words that are unnaturally long. The created words sound like Old English or something, and for me the feeling is of a meaning that is possibly comprehensible but just out of reach.

Near-complete

By the time I announced the generator on Gnoetry Daily a couple weeks ago, I had explored a number of new features:

I’d implemented GUI versions of the parameters I’d been playing around with, such as type of n-grams model, number of characters to generate, and verbosity of generation details. I’d implemented free-style transformations by adding a percent chance of inserting a newline after any word, or initial spaces before a line. I’d messed around with these after using them at 0% chance each, which only uses newlines and initial spaces that are seen in the corpus.

I’d added a feature to show the portmanteaux in the output. Basically, this looks at the words in the output, and prints any that it doesn’t see in the words in the corpus. Sometimes it lists words that are in the larger set of English language words; in the image above, charNG would list the word “infect” as a portmanteau, because the corpus only contains “infection” (“infect” is created from the output element “infect,” which is created from the 5-gram “fect,” (note the comma) which is derived from such corpus elements as ” defect,”) One of the ways I like to use charNG is to just paste in a corpus, generate 4-grams, and look at the portmanteaux

Of course, just generating a bunch of text and picking out what you like is fun too. I posted some of this on Gnoetry Daily:

• Crowning the blood
• Pain of Manhood
• you see me (sucka for love)

I especially like how 4-grams worked when processed with codework parenthetical insertions:

all the reployal :f.u[n]tually she lawsui:t.er[ror] to had objections who aborited minationstar mand
his some, assed and, in Alliarace on the :w.ith[ered]eir relights
be:f.or[get]m, thearenticational to the
1.2 bi:s.ho[ut]page which on :l.us[ts]iona, while rule as Howed
t:h.or[ror]res:t.ri[ck]al familigate.]

 
– from be:g.al[lows] US govergned

There are many features that could still be added, but sometimes I think it’s best to keep the generator simple, so I don’t get caught up on one approach for too long. There are so many possibilities out there.

A clockwork toy rattles on the tabletop;
listen to it
and build another.

One of the most interesting things in developing charNG was varying the chaining approach during generation. I tried choosing between “Markov”, “one-character overlap”, or “cento/cut-up”, as described in the documentation I wrote for charNG. Basically, one-char overlap only considers the last character when deciding which n-gram to choose next. And cento/cut-up doesn’t consider any context when deciding what n-gram to pick next; it basically picks a random set of cut-ups.

This gave me the opportunity to read up on Centos a bit. Basically they’re supervised cut-ups, traditionally using classical poetry as source text; the practice is from Greek poets from before 400 BC and Roman poets thereafter. In particular, I tracked down Ausonius’ “Cento Nuptialis”, which was composed to amuse the Emperor Valentinian in the 4th century AD. On pg 373- of a Loeb Classical Library translation that’s been scanned online, Ausonius introduces his cento by saying:

This book, then hurriedly composed in a single day with some lamp-lit hours thrown in, I lately found among my rough drafts; and so great is my confidence in your sincerity and affection, that for all your gravity I could not withhold even a ludicrous production. So take a little work, continuous, though made of disjointed tags; one, though of various scraps; absurd, though of grave materials; mine, though the elements are another’s…

And if you will suffer me, who need instruction myself, to instruct you, I will expound what a cento is. It is a poem compactly built out of a variety of passages and different meanings, in such a way that either two half-lines are joined together to form one, or of one line and the following half with another half. For to place two (whole) lines side by side is weak, and three in succession is mere trifling.

Decimius Magnus Ausonius, consul, soldier, and mediocre poet, from the 21st century I your peer salute you.

*

Between the much-needed efforts of the Electronic Literature Organization‘s Electronic Literature Directory (ELD) and now the European-focused Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice (ELMCIP), it seems our field has reacted quickly and seriously to Nick Montfort and Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s 2004 declaration in “Acid Free Bits” that “Preserving e-lit, and creating e-lit that will remain available, is essential to the very concept of electronic literature, the basic idea that the computer can be a place for new literary works that make use of its capabilities.” Certainly, one of the many benefits of these directories is that they’re built to preserve and provide broad online access to works of e-literature created since the advent of the internet.

However, no archive can ever, nor should it ever aspire to, be universal and complete; and while both the ELD and the ELMCIP also catalogue earlier works of e-literature, an obvious stumbling block that neither one can entirely overcome is the material specificity, through and through, of works created before the internet and the domination of the Graphical User Interface. The ELD and the ELMCIP wouldn’t exist if we weren’t already agreed on the material basis of e-literature – a materiality that can and must be preserved. And, as such, it’s not particularly revolutionary to point out that the materiality of a poem like bpNichol‘s 1983 – 1984 “First Screening,” whic was created on the Apple IIe for a command-line interface, simply cannot be preserved under the current model of online directories. Instead, what the ELD and the ELMCIP have done – in fact, all they can do – is point to works such as Nichol’s, gesture to them, but not preserve them.

My paper today, then, outlines how I have approached the pressing issue of preserving, maintaining access to, and – perhaps especially – how I’ve been thinking through early works of e-literature by creating what I’ve called the Archeological Media Lab, aligning it with the field of Media Archaeology (at the moment the best writings on M.A. in English are probably best found in Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka’s forthcoming Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications). The lab tries to take on, loosely speaking, a locavore approach to both sustaining and framing e-literature – one that is primarily hands-on and resolutely of the local, with only a very modest global or online presence. However, I should openly admit that the lab’s limited funding makes it difficult to build a lab on the scale of a project supported by the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) or the Salman Rushdie archive that’s at Emory – both of which I’ll touch on shortly. Certainly I would be grateful to have the kind of online catalogue that MITH has for its collection of vintage computers. I am, in fact, hoping to build a more extensive online gallery of the lab’s holdings, modeled after MITH’s online collection, this summer but it’ll be framed in such a way that, through some sort of dissonance in the interface, viewers will be accutely aware that the most the website can ever hope to be is the equivalent of a catalogue of museum or gallery holdings. For now, I’ll just say that small scale of the lab dovetails nicely with its locavore philosophy.

Nearly all digital media labs are conceived of as a place for experimental research using the most up-to-date, cutting-edge tools available. However, this lab – which is, as far as I know, the only one of its kind in North America – is a place for cross-disciplinary experimental research and teaching actively using the tools, the software and platforms, from the past. There are a small handful of sibling organizations in the U.S. – though, notably, they are more akin to archives or special collections than they are labs in the sense of being an utterly open space for hands-on teaching and research. One is MITH’s collection of vintage computers which I just mentioned and which is unique, in my mind, because of its online catalogue of vintage computers which clearly and carefully reflects a dedication not just to the idea of materiality generally, but to the fact of materiality at every level of each computing device; as they describe it on their website, “Every item is accompanied with some basic descriptive and technical metadata…Where it is possible metadata on actual manufacture dates and companies has been given, and an emphasis on connections (external and internal) and the use capacity of the device (read/write abilities, OS affordances, etc.) is attempted.”

There is also the Preserving Virtual Worlds project – a much more large-scale project focused on preservation rather than access, involving the Rochester Institute of Technology, Stanford University, the University of Maryland, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Linden Lab. Their stated aim is “to investigate issues surrounding the preservation of video games and interactive fiction through a series of case studies of games and literature from various periods in computing history, and to develop basic standards for metadata and content representation of these digital artifacts for long-term archival storage.”

Finally, tackling both access and preservation, Emory University has launched their Born-Digital Archives program with the Salman Rushdie archive, making his digital files available to the public – files which include “forty thousand files and eighteen gigabytes of data on a Mac desktop, three Mac laptops, and an external hard drive.” However, it is not insignificant that all these digital files – including those from his Macintosh Performa 5500 – are available to the public only through an emulated environment.

By contrast, while the Archeological Media Lab cannot provide such broad and institutionalized access, what it can do is provide small-scale access to defining moments in the history of computing and e-literature. In addition to landmark computers such as the Commodore 64 from 1982, the Vectrex Gaming Console also from 1982, the Compaq III portable laptop from 1987, the NeXT Cube from 1990, the lab also houses working Apple IIe’s and an Apple Lisa. These last two computers are particularly important for understanding the history of personal computing and computer-mediated writing; while they were both released in 1983, the shift in interface from the one to the other, and therefore the shift in the limits and possibilities for what one could create, is remarkable. The Apple II series of computers all used the command-line interface and they were also the first affordable, user-friendly, and so most popular personal computers ever while the Apple Lisa was the first commerical computer to use a Graphical User Interface.

In terms of the literature created on these platforms from the past, I would say that a work such as First Screening by bpNichol – created in 1983-1984 using an Apple IIe and the Apple BASIC programming language – is exemplary in that it, like most other early works of e-lit, cannot be understood if we view it only via a media translation. On the one hand, where would we be if First Screening wasn’t first recovered by Jim Andrews, Geof Huth, Lionel Kearns, Marko Niemi, and Dan Waber, made available via emulator, Javascript, Hypercard and Quicktime movie and now preserved on both the ELD and the ELMCIP? But on the other hand, there is simply no substitute for the command-line interface paired with physical structure of the Apple II computer; as Matthew Kirschenbaum points out in his groundbreaking 2008 book Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination, the Apple II computer has no hard drive; instead, “a program is loaded by inserting the disk in the external drive and booting the machine. In practical terms, this meant first retrieving the program by going to one’s collection of disks and rummaging through them…Consider the contrast in affordances to a file system mounted on a hard drive: here you located the program you wanted by reading a printed or handwritten label, browsing like you would record albums or manila file folders, not by clicking on an icon” (33). Everything about the Apple II system, its entire hardware and software system, offers both writer and reader an utterly different set of experiences than when they read or write on, say, a MacBook or a PC or when they read First Screening by way of a Graphical User Interface.

Again, this is not to say that these media translations aren’t as important or as necessary as the emulated environment for Rushdie’s digital files. It’s simply to point out that one would never know from the quicktime emulation that First Screening is a series of poems whose meaning is actually activated through the writer/programmer’s invitation to the reader/view to type in commands – from the fact that you have to type “run” to initiate it (and of course there’s no instruction to “type run”) to the fact that in line 110 of the code for First Screening, Nichol writes: “REM   FOR THE CURIOUS VIEWER/READER THERE’S AN ‘OFF-SCREEN ROMANCE’ AT 1748. YOU JUST HAVE TO TUNE IN THE PROGRAMME.” As Jim Andrews discovered in the process of creating the emulations, “the poem is off-screen in the sense that to play/view it, you have to type in a command” – either RUN 1748, RUN 1748-, GOSUB 1748, GOSUB 1748 – “you have to engage with the language machine at that level to view the poem that remains off-screen until you summon it.”

Finally, I also see the Archeological Media Lab as a kind of thinking device in that providing access to the utterly unique, material specificity of these computers, their interfaces, platforms, and software makes it possible to defamiliarize or make visible for critique contemporary, invisible interfaces and platforms. It’s an approach to media of the present via media of the past that I’ve come to align with the small but vibrant field of “media archaeology” (which, incidentally, I didn’t know existed when I came up with the concept for the lab). In part influenced by the so-called “Berlin school of media studies” that has grown out of Friedrich Kittler’s new media approach, which is invested in both recovering the analog ancestors of the digital and reading the digital back into the analog, media archaeology has taught me that one can use older writing interfaces as a way to bring the digital back into view once again. One example of the invisibility of contemporary computing that I like to use comes in a well-known TED.com unveiling of a multitouch interface, during which creator Jeff Han proudly declares that “there’s no instruction manual, the interface just sort of disappears.” Another example comes from the Natural User Interface Group who define NUI as “an emerging concept in Human/Computer Interaction that refers to a interface that is effectively invisible, or becomes invisible to its user with successive learned interactions;” and they use “natural” to mean “organic, unthinking, prompted by instinct.” But just whose instinct is directing the shape of these interfaces? Or, more to the point, why would we – as users as much as creators or writers – want our interactions with interfaces to be “unthinking” so that we have no sense of how the interface works on us, delimiting reading, writing, even thinking?

In a sense, then, the reconfigured media archaeology approach I am trying to take up in the lab is a reconfigured media archaeology applied both to computing’s past and to a constantly receding present that masquerades as the near future. Without reading early computing devices and interfaces against their contemporary off-spring and vice-versa, the present slips from view for the contemporary computing industry – which is accelerating its drive to achieve perfect invisibility through mulit-touch, Natural User Interfaces, and ubiquitous computing devices – desires nothing more than to efface the interface altogether and so also efface our ability to read let alone write the interface. By contast, it’s the combination of the strangeness and the vague familiarity of artifacts such as the black and green command-line interface and the original Apple Basic version of First Screening that remind us of what our computing devices can do, of what we can do to and with them.